Problem with Amazon MP3 Uploader: file names appear to have Chinese characters

I've been on a mission to convert 300 CD's into MP3 files and then upload them to Amazon's Cloud.
After a week of converting CD's, I thought I was  home-free. Now all I had to do was spend the 10GB of bandwidth to upload the files to the cloud, a process that would take a couple of days.

After a day of uploading, I discovered that many files (about 3/4th of the total uploaded files) had their titles and album names appearing in the cloud player with Chinese characters.  I can play the songs; they obviously uploaded correctly, but it is now impossible to categorize the songs.

I've contacted Amazon support, but it has been several days, so I presume no reply is forthcoming. A second attempt at uploading several days later yielded the same result.

Has anyone else this issue? 

Amazon's MP3 Uploader often inserts Chinese characters into the name, artist and album fields.

Before you are seduced by Amazon's offer of "free unlimited storage" for MP3 files and start uploading thousands of files, beware that this process may take a lot longer than you think.

Google Plus is a big disappointment so far.

So all this noise about Google+, the Facebook killer.  I have read they are over 10 million users and growing like crazy. Yet, if I try to log into Google+, I'm greeted with the message: "Right now, we're testing with a small number of people, but it won't be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone."

Why on earth would Google want to promote this service when only a paltry 10 million or so can actually use it? It's irritating to say the least, and my interest is waning. This reminds of the Orkut debacle, when Google did the same thing.  I couldn't log into that service either, unless I was invited. Guess what? No one invited me to Orkut and I setup shop on LinkedIn and Facebook instead.

Come on, Google! Open the doors already and let us in!  I'm tired of standing in the rain.

Why I probably won't subscribe to Office365.

I joined the Office365 beta last month. Although Microsoft's online productivity suite is useful, I probably won't be buying it.

Office365 presents online versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote Sharepoint, Powerpoint and Lync Messenger.  I am a heavy Outlook and Powerpoint user, and I was very quickly at home using these online applications. I liked the ability to easily share my work product with others for collaboration.

If you are approaching Office365 from the perspective of an Office 2010 desktop app user, you will find the suties a bit incomplete. Although the online apps have a fairly rich GUI, I found the overall performance to be sluggish. But I could live with sluggish performance if necessary.

As a small business owner (6 employees, distributed), what really got me excited about Office365 beta  was the opportunity to have access to a collaborative suite that was familiar to my employees.  We have struggled to share documents efficiently but have ruled out hosting Sharepoint because of costs.  Office365 holds the promise to be a good alternative for us. 

I also thought that we could really benefit from Microsfot hosted email.  Our SMTP email accounts are on a shared email server.  If any other email users on a different domain hosted by our shared server misbehaves,  then our email begins to bounce as our email server IP address is posted on the SORBS "spam" sever list. SORBS makes our lives harder when our emails suddenly and without warning begin to bounce back to us (I hate SORBS for their irresponsible machine gun approach to spam, but thats another post).  The idea of using a Microsoft hosted email server and a rich online Outlook client to complement our local Outlook 2010 apps seemed like a no brainer.

But then I learned that someone at Microsoft made the mistake of presuming that one Office365 user will have one email address. This is not an unusual mistake for Microsoft to make, since they are a gigantic business and have completely forgotten what it is like to operate a small business. But restricting users to one email account is a very silly policy. As a small business owner, I answer to many email addresses, including sales@, support@, info@, webmaster@, and several others.  This alone is a deal killer for many small businesses -- no way will I pay $6 per email address, and I shouldn't have to restructure my business around Microsoft's arbitrary email account restrictions.
The problem with Office365, from my perspective, is that we are looking at it as a way to complement our existing Office 2010 software (which we have already bought and paid for) and our collaborative processes, and I think Office365 will do this very well. 

Although Office365 shows great promise to server small businesses, Microsoft needs to quickly go back and fix these pricing and structural missteps.  The essence of my gripes are rooted in policy and pricing mistakes, not software mistakes.  If they do this, they may find themselves with a competitive online office suite offering that small businesses like mine will flock to.

Republicans shut down Minnesota State government. Millions of dollars wasted. Tourists disappointed.

Well, they did it.

The Minnesota Republicans have shut down state government. What a glorious day to be a Republican, I guess.  By sticking to their hard line ideology, the "no taxes" Republicans have ground government to an expensive halt in Minnesota, presumably under the guise of fiscal responsibility.

Last night, I stopped for bait at my favorite bait shop here in the heart of Minnesota's lake land. It's July 4th weekend, prime season for tourism.  The first thing I heard was appologies from the cashier who was trying to explain to an incredulous man from Idaho that he could not purchase a fishing license.  The man had his boat in tow and couldn't believe that he had driven so far with his boat only to find that he would not be able to fish.  I hope he wasn't on his way to a Minnesota state park, because those campgrounds have also been closed by Republicans.

Minnesota's state parks will lose millions of dollars per day, thanks to this Republican shut down of the state.

The shut down is incredibly foolish, fiscally irresponsible, and a very pathetic, non-transparent exertion of Republican ideology.

Minnesotans will not soon forgot the Republican role in this mess.  Shame on you Minnesota Republicans -- you don't care who you hurt, just as long as your rich buddies get their tax breaks.  Your are an embarrassment to our Great State, and we will not soon forget this. Neither will that man from Idaho.